Business, Financial & Legal News - Page 74

Luxury brand empire owner Bernard Arnault briefly became the world's richest man, with a net worth of $186.3 billion at the time... versus Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and his net worth of around $186 billion ($300 million less).

Well, it has been barely 24 hours and those few hundred million dollars matter a great deal when you're this rich and want that coveted "world's richest person" title. Well, Arnault is out -- his real-time net worth has dropped to $188 billion, meanwhile, Bezos has his net worth jump to $188.9 billion.

Bezos was behind by $300 million yesterday and is now $900 million ahead... all in less than 24 hours. I cannot fathom having that much money ($900 million) let alone $188 billion behind it. We should expect this fight to continue until one of their companies sees its share value drop by a few percentage points, but who will be first? Bezos or Arnault?

A court has found that Tesla is guilty after owners of one of the electric vehicles sued the company for their cars battery life being reduced.

Tesla has been ordered by a court in Norway to pay 136,000 kroner, or $16,000 each to owners of specific Model S's after owners of the vehicles complained that the vehicle's battery capacity and charging speeds were reduced. According to Nettavisen, paying out these fines could cost Tesla hundreds of millions of dollars.

Owners complained that there was a drop in range of up to 30 miles after Tesla implemented a 2019 software update. Additionally, these owners also noticed that the DC fast-charging at Tesla Supercharger stations were reduced. These issues are reportedly present in 2013 - 2015 models, and according to Tesla, the update was rolled out to "protect the battery and improve battery longevity". Tesla also said that it would only affect "a small percentage of owners."

In the early years of YouTube, a video of two young children took off on the platform, garnering millions of hits and eventually becoming the internet phenomenon that we know today as "Charlie Bit My Finger".

That 56-second long video has now amassed more than 850 million views and has been sold as a non-fungible token (NFT) via an auction. Origin Protocol ran the auction and has said that the plan was to remove the original video from YouTube and take it to be "memorialized on the blockchain." Now, 3F Music, which already owns other popular meme-NFT's, picked up the "Charlie Bit My Finger" NFT for $760,999.

Apart of owning the NFT, 3F Music also has the opportunity to create a parody video of the 2007 video with the brother's Harry and Charlie Davies-Carr, who are 15 and 17. The auction website states that the winner of the Charlie Bit My Finger NFT could "recreate a hilarious modern-day rendition of the classic clip". For more information on this story, check out this link here.

Bernard Arnault has overtaken Amazon founder Jeff Bezos as the richest person on the planet, with Arnault having an estimated net worth of $186.3 billion against Bezos and his $186 billion. Because that $300 million really, really makes a difference at this level, I guess.

Right behind Arnault and Bezos is SpaceX and Tesla founder, as well as The Dogefather himself, Elon Musk with an estimated net worth of around $151 billion. Behind Musk, we have Bill Gates, who recently announced he is divorcing his wife, Melinda Gates, with a net worth of $124 billion. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is next, staying in the top three with his $97 billion in net worth.

Arnault has amassed luxury goods brands under his LVMH umbrella, with the likes of Louis Vuitton, Sephora, Marc Jacobs Christian Dior, Fendi, and many others. The thing is, in March 2020 Arnault was worth around $76 billion but in a post-pandemic COVID-19 fueled world he (and many other billionaires and corporations) are now worth magnitudes more money.

Apple is currently building out its new "Guizhou-Cloud Big Data (GCBD)" which is its new data center that will house iCloud data of its Chinese customers.

Chinese government laws changed back in 2016, which required all "personal information and important data" that was collected in China, was to remain in China. This forced Apple to move its iCloud data of its Chinese customers out of its US-based servers (and other servers globally) to the new GCBD facility.

This new facility is codenamed "Golden Gate" and allows Apple to slip something through: it can break US laws which stops US-based companies from giving data to Chinese authorities. Well, Apple seems to have no problem in doing this as... well... it seems to already be a done deal.

A few weeks ago, it was announced that Bill and Melinda Gates are divorcing, and since then, reports have surfaced regarding why they have divorced.

Last week, a report from The Wall Street Journal suggested that Melinda was considering divorcing Bill for two years before the divorce was official. The Journal also suggested that the main speculative reason behind the divorce was that Melinda was upset with Bill's close friendship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

According to people who had knowledge of his companies and financial dealings and told The New York Times, Bill had pursued other women who worked at Microsoft and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. At the moment, six former employees of Gates have said that the billionaire's actions caused them to feel "uncomfortable".

AT&T and Discovery are reportedly set to announce that they will be combining their media assets into one, super-gigantic content beast that will fight Netflix and Disney in the current -- and more importantly, future content and streaming wars.

If you consider AT&T has a huge amount of media corporations under its umbrella, including Time Warner which it acquired a few years back in a landmark $85 billion deal -- on top of the likes of CNN, HBO, the Cartoon Network, TBS, TNT, and many more -- then the picture becomes much more clear.

Discovery on the other hand offers up some of that binge-worthy reality cable TV programming and networks including HGTV, the Food Network, TLC, and many more. Millions are moving from the normal cable TV package and into streaming packages, so media companies are scrambling to get shift with the times as quickly as they can.

TSMC was expected to spend between $10 billion and $12 billion on its next-gen 3nm chip factory in Arizona, USA -- but it seems that the Taiwanese semiconductor world leader has much bigger plans.

According to people familiar with the matter, Reuters reports that TSMC is "weighing plans to pump tens of billions of dollars more into cutting-edge chip factories in the U.S. state of Arizona than it had previously disclosed, but is cool on prospects for an advanced European plant".

TSMC is building a next-gen 3nm fabrication plant in Arizona and could spend somewhere between $23 billion and $25 billion to get it operational, which would put them ahead of Samsung which has just begun construction of its new 5nm plant in South Korea. TSMC is already pumping out 5nm chips for companies, with Apple using a custom M1 chip on 5nm inside of its new MacBook and iPad Pro.

Samsung has announced that construction of a new production line has started and that the company expects the plant to be operational in the second half of 2022. This is part of a $151 billion investment into Samsung aiming to be the world leader in advanced semiconductor technology against the likes of so-very-dominant TSMC, Intel, and others.

The new state-of-the-art facility will be making 14nm DRAM and 5nm logic semiconductors, both of which will be based on extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography technology. NVIDIA's next-gen Hopper GPU architecture will be made on 5nm and according to my sources, NVIDIA suffered the blows it has taken with Ampere on the 8nm node from Samsung -- against TSMC and its 7nm node for AMD with Radeon (and Ryzen) because after that, it could get to tap Samsung's new 5nm tech.

This is where NVIDIA will play catch up in a big way, with Samsung's new 5nm plant up and operational in the second half of 2022 we can begin to expect that NVIDIA's next-gen Hopper GPU will be unveiled sometime in the second half of 2022. NVIDIA itself even teased "Ampere Next" for 2022 just last month.

Samsung has just announced that it is boosting its investments in bleeding-edge chip manufacturing, with the South Korean giant spending $151 billion between now and 2030 to boost research into next-gen process technology, and the construction of a new production facility.

The company had previously said that it would be investing $115 billion between now and 2030 but has now revised that, with a larger $151 billion. Samsung Electronics will be pumping the investments into its System LSI and Foundry business, with Samsung "closely collaborating with various semiconductor design companies, component and equipment manufacturers, as well as academia in making progress towards that goal".

Samsung said that the expansion of its Foundry Business will "fuel entire new industries on next-generation technologies like AI, 5G and autonomous driving".